“So we ran for the main square. Taney Square. Anywhere we could get the space for a decent firing line and form a schiltron, not that we had the ammunition for that but what else were we going to do? The marines were splendid — straight there and forming up, getting the bastards as they trickled in but it was never going to be a trickle for long. There were only a dozen of us from the Coroner Corps in the square, all we had was pistols and not many rounds for those. We saved it for when they got close — keep the revenants off the boys with the rifles, that was the word.
“The revenants got into the square from every side. The swarm from the harbour followed us in first and then the ones from the town came in. Some of ’em had marine uniforms on. We didn’t really know how the disease worked then — they’d probably eaten infected meat and never knew it until revenants ripped them half to pieces or the locals shot them or whatever happened, and then they got up again. I saw a white coat in there as well, that was the Coroner Corps uniform, white coat, army shirt and breeches, long boots. Cap was gone but I recognised him: Lieutenant Miller. Right bastard but he didn’t deserve that. Someone had shoved a bit of glass in his neck and it was still there.
“The Marine Captain in charge told the men to wait until the revenants got to fifty yards. The bastards came on, moaning. I stood with my boys to look after ’em and do what I could. Not a one of ’em didn’t trust me to do what needed doing. Best men I ever knew. Marine Captain tells ’em to take aim. Just what’s in front, nothing else. Then fire.
“Must have been thirty, forty revenants dropped just like that. Right in the head, brains blown back on the faces of the ones behind. But they missed a lot as well. Bullets went into shoulders or necks or chests or just missed altogether and that was no good to anyone. They reloaded and second ranks came up to fire. Another thirty-odd went down. But there were thousands behind ’em and they kept coming, kept getting closer, no matter how many dropped. One got past the others on a blind spot. I put it down with my pistol once it got close enough. Revenants were all over the square, and more coming in from every street. I couldn’t see an end to the swarm behind.
“And that’s when the navy started shelling us.
“The spotters on the Indefatigable couldn’t see an end to the swarm either. So the commanders tried something else. They saw us in the square, thought we were going to fight down to the last man and decided it wasn’t worth waiting until a crowd of two thousand turned into a crowd of two thousand and a few more because we’d joined ’em.
“First shell hit a ways past the square. Finding the range. Then another one just before it. Then they had us, and revenants were flying in the air, coming down among the marines and even just bits of the damn things could be dangerous. All they needed was a head, a torso, and an arm to crawl with. Buildings getting hit as well, shrapnel flying all over, good men cut down before the revenants even got to ’em. We thought we might last hours out there before the revenants finished us but we weren’t going to last minutes with the navy joining in as well. The Marine Captain was down. Me and my marines were cut off from all the others. Shells still coming in, blowing holes in the line and bits of men and rifles falling on us.
“Nobody’d tried explosives on revenants before. We never usually met them in those kinds of numbers, not then, not until the last outbreak. Somebody must have thought dropping a shell into a pack of ’em would do a world of good. And yeh, some of ’em dropped. But the rest stayed up. Didn’t matter how much you ripped out their guts, they kept coming. And the shelling made them worse. The blast wave, the pressure, it did something to their nerves. Didn’t knock ’em down at all. It hurt them. Drove ’em mad. They didn’t moan any more, they screamed. They came at you running. They never ran if they could help it otherwise, just kept coming at a walk. And now we had hundreds in the square still on their feet, only thing stopping them getting us was the shells still coming down and tossing them about until they got up and tried it again.
“There’s two things you can do in that kind of nonsense. Freeze up or run for it. Best thing I did that day was shout at all my marines and tell them to run for it with me. Couldn’t stay out there. Nobody was going to get out of that square alive if they stayed.
“The shells had cleared one of the streets so we made for that. Couldn’t call it much of a street — buildings on both sides blown out, rubble everywhere, bits of revenants in the wreckage, arms coming out and grasping at you. Lieutenant Miller was there — torn in half, one good arm still holding his pistol but no idea what to do with it. I put him down and took it for myself, and his ammo. Needed ’em both just to get down the road. Somebody did a drawing of me for the papers after it was over. The Fury in the White Coat, they called me, with my two pistols. Kept on carrying two after that as well, even at Tringarrick. You can never have too many.
“The town hall was still standing. Don’t know what happened to the mayor and corporation. Don’t care. I’d have probably put them down if I saw them. I got twenty men past the revenants and the shells — not enough to defend the place but there wasn’t anything else left standing. Nice strong stone building, harder to blow apart than all the timber ones and they hadn’t targeted it directly so we blockaded it best we could, took one corner over the cellar entrance and holed up there. Nobody got through without some kind of injury. I had gashes all down my left side from shrapnel. Two of the men died within an hour and we put ’em down again when they got up.”
She went quiet for a few moments.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Long night. Longest I ever knew. We escaped in all the shelling so the revenants didn’t know where we were at first, meant we had time to get some barricades up. And they kept on shelling all the time. Ten hours, it went on. Must have been more than one dreadnought out there. They were trying to level the place. Didn’t work. Just made things worse.
“Revenants kept coming, soon as one of ’em knew where we were, they all bloody knew or seemed like. We only had the ammo we brought with us and it wasn’t enough. We blocked all the windows so they had to come in through the courtyard. We could get good range on them there but we ran out of rounds in three hours. After that it was hand to hand. Good thing it was one of those places with halberds, and swords and all that hanging on the wall. I kept a few bullets back for the end and let the boys take the cutlery. We formed a line in a corridor, the ones with pole arms would pin the revenants while the ones with swords and axes smashed their heads. We blocked up the corridor with the corpses and then they found another way in and we set it up again. Must have been hundreds, between those we put down in the courtyard and the ones in the corridors. Most of them shrieking at us, still bloody mad because of the shelling.
“We couldn’t keep that up. We were down to eight and we were exhausted. A fair few of the ones coming at us had revenned in the square as well, that was the worst. Sticking a knife in the eye of someone you’d been eating at the same table with for weeks. I didn’t let the men see the look on my face. Just got it done and moved on. But we had to go. There was only the cellar left. We’d taken a look earlier — opened it up, went down, had a good yell, so we knew there wasn’t anything coming after us from down there. But there wasn’t any way out, either, or that’s what we thought. MacDonalt found a door to the sewers, brand new sewers, they were still digging to try and improve public hygiene and beat the cholera. I went out first because I was the last one with bullets in my guns. I’d been saving them for us. We saw a couple of revenants in there but that was all. I put them down. We barred the door behind us. Wouldn’t last forever, not against the ones gone mad from the shelling but it was all we had. Ran for it and found a way out, and all it did was take us back into the streets.
“But there weren’t any streets. They’d been shelling all night and the sun had come up. All we could see was smoke and rubble. Some buildings still on fire, making the smoke glow orange. Didn’t see any revenants — not in one piece, anyway. There were bits of the
m everywhere. We had to stick a few that still had heads. We thought the ones with legs wouldn’t be far behind.
“We heard footsteps — close, somewhere in the smoke. Couldn’t tell who or what. I told the men to form a line. They still had all the old mediaeval weapons, whatever they could fit down the cellar. I still had a couple of bullets. There wasn’t anywhere to go so we held our ground.
“Twenty marines came out of the smoke, rifles pointed at us — us with our halberds and swords and a couple of pistols. Nobody knew what to do for a moment, until the Marine Lieutenant on the other side told his men to stand down and I did the same. They were the reserves from the Indefatigable. They’d been landed once the shelling stopped. Tanymouth was still crawling with revenants but a lot of them were buried and the reserves were going round trying to find them. They weren’t expecting survivors.”
A crash came from elsewhere in the infirmary, probably Elsbet’s room. For a moment I thought she might have hurt someone, but then I heard Veofol calling for a mop to clean up a spill. She’d thrown a cup at a wall, nothing more. I turned my attention back to Olivia.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“Slept for a couple of days once they got me back to the ship. They gave me some leave. Hah. And a medal. The Star of Juno. Their way of covering up after the shelling — try and make me a hero. Fury in a White Coat and all that.”
“It sounds like you deserved it.”
“The ones who died deserved it as well, but all they got was a lovely spot in a mass grave.”
“Hm.”
“And no bloody death-shock, or PTSD, or whatever you call it. Not even a touch. Nothing. No nightmares. I slept fine, thank you very much.”
“So if I’d crept up on you after the first outbreak…”
“I’d have jumped. Like anyone else. But I’d have put you down if you were a revenant.”
“And what about the marines?”
“What about ’em?”
“How did they do?”
She scowled at me. “Yeh. They got it. Some of them. Most of them.”
“What happened to them?”
“They got put in madhouses. Or left on the streets. I wasn’t one of ’em. What’s your point?”
“It hits different people in different ways, Olivia. For some, they get it after the first experience of trauma. But for others it takes years of repeated exposure. Like, say, being surrounded by revenants for twelve years…”
She glared back at me. She’d had enough for today.
“How’s your arm?”
“Can’t feel a thing.”
She stood. “Well if you’re better, then I’m getting back out in the garden.”
She left, without any further acknowledgement of my point. She was right, in some ways; PTSD is far from an automatic response to trauma. But the likelihood does increase massively according to the length of exposure to traumatic events, and her symptoms made anything else implausible. And maybe I’d have pushed it further that day, but I decided me and my arm needed some rest.
8. Kwame
Kwame sat in a darkened room, watching a series of lights pulse across a curved wall. I was next door, shut away with the tomographer and a neurologist so our own nervous systems would not disturb the readings.
We’d taken him to Hub Metro for the calibration. While we had enough equipment at the centre to monitor his medical condition and were installing more for the dream recording, it took a rather finer set of instruments to get the baselines we needed before we could begin. The entire room was a tomographical scanner, taking millions of sectional images of his entire body every second and building a full model of his mind.
“Ah, there, you see?” said Professor Ebbs, eyes sparkling with the happy light of a scientist seeing his hypothesis confirmed. “The visual cortex is routed differently than in most species, thanks to the latent hibernation ability…”
“Really?” I asked, doing my best to conceal annoyance at his condescension.
“Well, of course, you knew that. But it’s following the pattern we might expect in other hibernating human species. The visual cortex runs differently during REM sleep, and differently still during hibernation…”
“He’s drifting again,” said the tomographer. Kwame was supposed to concentrate on a point of light in the middle of the wall.
I activated the intercom. “Kwame? You need to look at the white dot.”
“Of course. Forgive me.”
“Do you need a break?”
“No. Please continue.”
“Here comes sequence fourteen,” said the tomographer. She switched off the intercom and turned to me. “It’s better if you keep him talking. He’s having trouble concentrating.”
I switched the intercom back on. “How are you doing, Kwame?”
“This is a surprisingly difficult task.”
“You’re doing fine. Just keep it up and we’ll be back home in time for dinner.”
“Yes.” He sighed and concentrated on the dot. “May I ask a question?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“What happened to your world?”
“I think I told you already.”
“I mean since then.”
“Oh. Well…” I glanced at the tomographer. She shrugged. “It’s not exactly somewhere you’d want to go on holiday.”
“You said you never went back.”
“No. There’s not much to go back to.”
“Is your world dead?”
“Very nearly.” I sighed and looked over my shoulder. Professor Ebbs and the tomographer did their best to pretend they weren’t interested. They’d never been refugees, and doubtless liked to hear the horror stories. “There are still some people there. We’ve been trying to get them out for decades but they refuse to go.”
“I imagine you have trouble understanding their determination.”
“No, not at all. It’s the homeworld. They want to keep it going as long as possible. Plus they’re mostly religious fundamentalists, so they think we’re the devil.”
“Every species has that kind of fool.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“Will they survive?”
“No. The volcano is still erupting. There’s so much sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere they have to stay underground and filter the air, but they can’t last forever. The last time they let us take a look at them, life expectancy was down to thirty-five years. That was ten years ago.”
Kwame didn’t answer.
“Kwame? Are you still there?”
“Yes. I was reflecting on the last people who survived on my world. They were in bunkers as well.”
“As far as we know, yes.”
“Some of them held out for decades. Watching the radiation meters. Hoarding their seedbanks. Hoping the fallout would wash away. Watching the next generation grow up hopeless and defeated. Thinking they were the last ones left. Probably cursing me if they knew what happened…”
“He’s drifting,” said the tomographer.
“Keep your eyes on the dot, Kwame,” I said.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Would you like to talk about something a bit more current?”
“I don’t… no, wait. May I ask you another question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Your world had leaders, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Did they act appropriately when the volcano erupted?”
“Not all of them, no. Some of them went to war over resources. That’s why there was a nuclear exchange. Even after that, some decided to delay the evacuation, over the advice of their scientists. A lot of people died.”
“Were they prosecuted?”
“Some were. Those that survived.”
“Were they convicted?”
“Yes. Well, a couple got off because they were prevented from starting the evacuation by legislatures, but most of the ones who caused unnecessary delay were found guilty. I can see where you’re goi
ng with this.”
“Does it give you satisfaction? To know they were convicted and punished?”
“It doesn’t bring anyone back.”
“How would you feel if they escaped justice?”
Professor Ebbs and the tomographer had given up trying to hide their interest. “I’d be angry. Is that the answer you were looking for?”
“Yes.”
“Your situation is different. My species has a government and judiciary. They put the leaders on trial, not the IU. The IU can’t hold those kind of hearings. We don’t interfere in internal matters.”
“Not even if millions of lives are at stake?”
“We offer help. We can’t do much if people say no.”
“Even if their governments are fools?”
“Even if.”
“And so millions die.”
“We have a non-intervention policy for a reason.”
“Yes. I know. It is very well reasoned and thought out, and the justifications make perfect sense. From the point of view of bureaucrats living comfortably on Hub.”
“I can understand you’d have a different point of view…”
“I am sure you can.”
“You’ve been through a terrible experience…”
“I simply hoped you might share my point of view. Given your own terrible experience.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 24
